1. Field
The present aspects relate to wireless communication devices, and more particularly, to apparatus and methods for improving access terminal battery life through search rate control.
2. Background
UMTS coverage (hereinafter referred to as “WCDMA coverage,” “3G coverage,” or simply as “3G”) is not ubiquitous and for sometime will remain as islands of coverage with GSM/GPRS/Edge coverage (hereinafter referred to as “2G coverage” or simply as “2G”) as the “fall back” technology that provides coverage to users leaving WCDMA coverage.
Once a user equipment (UE), which can also be referred to as a mobile, an access terminal, or other similar term), is camped on 2G cells, the UE reads the system information on the 2G cells to decide if the UE needs to start searching for WCDMA cells or not.
If the 2G cells contain the WCDMA NCELL list, then the UE is required to search for WCDMA cells every 30 seconds until all the primary synchronization codes (PSC) specified in the NCELL list are identified.
If UE is camped on a cell, which has the WCDMA NCELL list defined, but the WCDMA does not cover the entire area of the GSM cell, then the UE in such an area would be searching for WCMDA cells every 30 seconds and significantly reduce its battery life by so doing. Therefore, it would be desirable to have mechanisms and techniques that can lead to improvements in UE battery life for UEs on the edge of WCDMA coverage (3G coverage), while camped on in GSM/GPRS (2G).